Cellar Favorite: Champagne Louis Roederer – Inflection Points

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | DECEMBER 1, 2025

Longtime Roederer Chef de Caves Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon pulled out a stunning series of wines at the conclusion of my annual tasting of vins clairs and new releases earlier this year. Of course, it’s always interesting to taste older vintages, but these bottles represent something more than just rare wines from the past. Most of them represent inflection points in Lécaillon’s thinking.

The 1989 Cristal Rosé is a case in point. It was Lécaillon’s first vintage at Louis Roederer. Record-setting heat overwhelmed cooling systems in the winery, which gave out during harvest. For the first time, the winemaking team was forced to use dry ice to cool the fruit. At the time, Roederer favored fairly warm ferments of around 20°C (68°F). The cooling effect of the dry ice was stronger than anticipated, which resulted in a sort of cold-soak that lasted a few days. This experience led Lécaillon to lower temperatures in fermentation to 13-14°C (55-57°F) in the years that followed. By 2008, Lécaillon had reduced temperatures for the Rosé to 0°C (32°F), completing a significant transformation. “In my view, 1989 is the first vintage of climate change,” Lécaillon explained. “Before then, we never had to cool our tanks at night, we simply relied on the outside temperatures. But 1989 was a turning point.”

In 1990, Lécaillon began to reintroduce wood fermentations, which had been virtually abandoned in favor of stainless steel in the preceding years. Despite the warm growing season, the 1990 Cristal in this tasting shows some of the angular contours Lécaillon aimed to soften. In 1999, at just 33, Lécaillon became Chef de Caves at Roederer. Champagnes disgorged in the mid-1990s and early 2000s in this tasting are Lécaillon’s early experiments with late disgorgements that eventually led to the Vinothèque series.

This selection of Cristal and Cristal Rosé highlights several key inflection points at Champagne Louis Roederer.

During this time, Lécaillon began to lower dosage levels from the 11-12 grams per liter that had once been the norm to the 7-8 that is now standard. He also conducted numerous experiments with different bottle formats. It is widely accepted that large formats, especially magnum, are ideally suited for fine white and red wine. The benefit is described as more gradual aging because of a more favorable relationship of air to wine in the bottle. But Champagne is different. In Champagne, glass is also a fermentation vessel, not just an aging vessel. There is something clearly magical that happens when vin clair becomes Champagne. “Fermentation is just slower in magnum,” Lécaillon elaborated. “Usually, wines take one or two months more to ferment in magnum than they do in standard bottle. It is also quite typical for a Champagne in magnum to finish its fermentation with about 2 grams of residual sugar, whereas in a 750ml bottle it is closer to 0.5 grams per liter. Naturally, this impacts the decisions I take later on dosage.”

One of Lécaillon’s biggest achievements at Roederer has been a total rethinking in vineyard practices, first the transition to organic farming and then to biodynamic farming that was completed for Cristal Rosé in 2007 and Cristal in 2012. While that is not a topic specifically addressed in the wines in this small retrospective, I would be remiss in not mentioning Roeder’s leadership in this field within the Champagne community.

The 1955 Cristal brings this tasting to a rousing conclusion. A deeply colored wine, the 1955 could easily be mistaken for a Rosé. In the glass it is magical, a timeless beauty.

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